Get More Life from your Laptop Battery

Laptop battery life can vary wildly depending on how you use your PC.  Here are a few tips you can use to make your battery last as long as possible.

1. Adjust the brightness on the screen.  In Windows 10 you can do this by right clicking on the desktop and selecting Display Settings.  Use the slider to lower the brightness.  The dimmer the screen, the longer your battery will last.
2. Change the Power Options settings.  Power Options can be found in the control panel.  You can change how long the computer stays on before the screen goes off and how long the computer stays on before you put it to sleep.  Shorter times will help conserve the battery.
3. Close Apps that are not being used.   If you are in the habit of leaving multiple windows minimized instead of closing them, then you are using more power than necessary.
4. Disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if it’s not being used.
5. Upgrade you standard hard drive to a SSD.  Old mechanical hard drives require more energy to spin the disk, whereas new solid state drives have no moving parts and lower power consumption.  As a bonus, they are also faster!

As you are probably aware battery life will decrease in older batteries.  If you are curious how much of your max capacity is remaining you can run a quick report in Windows 10.  Here’s how to run the report:

To generate a battery report, open up a command prompt by pressing Windows+X and selecting ‘command prompt’ or in later versions ‘Windows PowerShell’.

At the prompt, type: powercfg /batteryreport /output c:\mybatteryreport.html

This will save a battery report to the root of your C drive.